


Headwaters

by Whreflections



Series: Hanniholidays Prompts 2017 [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Animal Death, Fantasy, Gen, HanniHolidays Prompt Calendar, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Magic, Mischa is Not Hannibal's Sister, Nazis, only briefly mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 09:37:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12981270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: For HanniHolidays Prompt Calendar Day 3- FireplaceFantasy AU.  Years ago, Mischa Lecter fled the Nazis with the rest of her family, leaving behind their home, Castle Lecter, and the lesser god that inhabited it- Hannibal, a dark but immensely loyal creature who had served their family for generations.  He adored her, more than all the others, and would have kept her with him forever.  Instead, he lost her, and has admitted no one to the house since.After his grandmother's death, though, Will Graham doesn't really have anywhere to call home.  With all the stories she told him about growing up in Castle Lecter (and about Hannibal, most of all), he can't pass up the chance that he just might belong somewhere after all.





	Headwaters

**Author's Note:**

> This is exceedingly bizarre and I'm convinced you'll either love it or hate it. I'm so sorry if it's the latter lmao 
> 
> (Also, in case anyone needs this note, though Hannibal /absolutely adores/ Mischa from birth and would chose her to stay with him and protect the land, his interest in her is not the slightest bit creepy or inappropriate at her age; he's just a very wonderful magical friend for smol Mischa, and she leaves when she's around 11. Had she stayed, his interest almost certainly would have changed, but it definitely hadn't yet.)

Before he came here, Will's plans for the ritual were concrete—he would go to his grandmother's room, where eggplants once grew on her dresser and fireflies came to her window at night to dance for her when she couldn't sleep.  He would clear the grate of the marks of age, and light his fire in the one place in this foreign house he most belonged, the place, too, that would call to Hannibal the most.

Climbing the gate, his certainties left him as wholly and quietly as the evaporation of dew.  It wouldn't have been accurate to say he was frightened, but he could feel the gravity of this place in his lungs in a way he had never imagined he might, as if the very air had gone soupy with magic, or dormancy.  The sign on the gate had been posted in Lithuanian, French, English, and Japanese:

 _The grounds are closed.  The house is not for sale.  If you test him, your fate is on your own head.  No one will come for you_.

It is tilted, tipped by vines, rusting at the corners.  Will remembers sitting in the kitchen with his grandmother, reading the news with her, watching her head shake at the image of her ancestral home in dour black and white, the headline just as stark—

_Grisly Lare of Castle Lecter claims the lives of six foolish foreigners_

She spoke in Lithuanian, soft and musical, but Will had needed none of the lessons she'd begun to teach him to know what she had said, to feel it down to his soul.

_Hannibal, Hannibal.  What have you done?_

All great houses have their souls, but few had ever racked up the body count of Hannibal, guardian of Castle Lecter, still raging in suspended grief decades on for the family he lost to the Nazis in the war.  While other houses took new families, accepted new bloodlines into their care, he remained resolute, waiting in a mire of crumbling courtyards and fading carpets, clinging in desperate, blind hope for the return of charges who would never arrive. 

Waiting, most of all, for the girl who had charmed him the moment she opened her eyes—Mischa Lecter, only child of Darius Lecter, heir to a title, a soaring castle, spreading grounds, and the Lare who embodied it all.  He would have been her guardian by right of birth alone, but the murmurs had begun not long after she began to walk.  He shadowed her with dedication beyond duty, beyond time.  Entirely appropriate, for a household god who had chosen his companion. 

If she had stayed here, she would have become immortal.  Instead, she fled the war to bounce from a cabin in the woods to New York to Louisiana.  There, she married a farmer, and found the immortality of motherhood, passing her eyes and her knees and her skill with machines down to her son and to his, a line stretching forward, drawing the ripples of her presence out into eternity. 

Here, in his isolation, it stood to reason that Hannibal knew none of this.  As far as he knew, the girl who had defied him and left with her family had died in the woods at the hands of the Reich, like so many others.  It was said, locally, that when they came for the house, his wrath was terrible.  The fires he set burned for days, or months, depending on who you asked, and how many beers you'd bought them.  The last man Will had spoken to had hunched over the table, his sweater bunching until crumbs trapped in the fuzz fell from him, cascading between then slats. 

_They say those Nazi bastards screamed for days.  You almost wonder what he did to the fuckers, eh?  I hope he skinned them.  They took my father's barn, and we got off easy._

In the shadow of the house, Will feels now more certain than ever that for all the darkness that hangs like Spanish moss about this place, the truth behind the murmurs of torture carried out here is all somewhat beside the point.  It wasn't the Nazis that screamed for days; it's not their agony he can feel suspended on the breeze. 

Still, there _is_ menace, too; he feels it move around him with the slick slide of oil, the knowing of too many eyes.  Hannibal watched him climb the gate and Hannibal is watching him now—there, from the mouth of a concrete fish with chipping lips; there, in the shadowy overhang of a door that leads to the bowels of the house.  Hannibal is everywhere, in the gargoyles and the trees and the very earth, and it was folly of the worst arrogance to believe that he would be permitted to pass unchecked into the sanctum of a room that has undoubtedly been guarded with all the reverence of a tomb. 

He will have to settle for the grand parlor on the first floor—close, and with a fireplace large and impressive enough to make something of an impression.  Wide enough for a man to walk into, wide enough to heat a room intended to be fit for company, warm even close as it was to the front doors. 

Too wide, honestly, for the size of fire he’ll have the time to set, but that’s no matter.  With most magic, it is the intent that matters, and Will can feel his all the way down to his bones. 

He lays the kindling, builds a tent as he was taught in the scouts as a boy.  Dry, and small, and centered beneath the larger wood it needs to catch.  He waits, feeling eyes on the back of his neck, until his fingers prickle from the rising heat as much as his spine.  Hannibal’s gaze feels full of hunger in its intensity, though hunger for what, precisely, Will couldn’t swear to. 

Will he be devoured, if he fails, or is it hunger for the process itself?  Or, is he intrigued by the possibility of a tenant, after all these years?  Surely— _surely_ —he is lonely.  Even shadows must have the company of the moon. 

Slowly, Will lowers his bag from his shoulder and feeds the items into the fire, one at a time. 

Paper from the year of his birth, with his name written on it in his own hand. 

An offering of life, taken from the land he hopes to call home.  Will has brought a fish he caught on the outskirts of the property, but as he lays it gently into the fire he hears his grandmother’s voice in his mind, full of fondness and memory. 

_He knew I had no taste for hunting, so I would bring him flowers from the fields.  He never took them from anyone else._

Will’s smile hurts, a sharp tug that comes more from his chest than the still healing wound in his cheek.  He has missed her since he lost her, but it is a terrible time of year, now, to be alone.  His hand flexes, and he continues. 

Bark, from a tree of the place he _had_ called home.

Blood, from the palm of his hand, pierced and drawn with bone.  Former life, drawing the proof of current life forth in a hot rush. 

It drips from his wrist, inelegant, twining into lines that cross and reform and run down toward his elbow, but the details don’t matter.  It’s touched the fire; that’s enough. 

As a child, watching old movies, the summoning of a Lare to make a request brought forth a dramatic shift—flames the color of an emerald sea, the slam of a dozen doors.  Hannibal’s entrance is dramatic only in his sudden subtlety when he was already so blatantly present, in the way Will can feel him become solid, coalescing onto the floor behind Will with all the lightness of a landing sparrow.  They breathe, for a moment, almost in tandem, but Will hears him like an echo, like an extension of himself. 

He is not afraid, not here at the last, but there is an _awareness_ in his throat he cannot name.  Despite teaching him all that she knew, his grandmother could never have prepared him for this.  It’s unlikely he ever loomed behind her this way, with the weight of lost years thickening the air around him like gathering smoke. 

Will turns, and does not see the creature of his grandmother’s photographs, though the wise and knowing eyes she drew until her death are the same.  Rich and golden, flecked with garnet and honey, just as she promised.  His hair, though, no longer draws to the mind fields before a harvest.  It’s ashen, mottled shades of grey that are echoed in a tint to his skin that isn’t pallor but seems instead the smudge of cinders, subduing the faint hint of the glow that she used to describe—or, the hint of grey is in itself all that’s left of it, the fire of his magic burned low in his hibernation.    

His head tilts, like a clockwork doll, his eyes unblinking.  “Will Graham, you say.  What brings you here?” 

“Home,”  Will says, because it’s true, and because she _did_ teach him well. 

 _Keep it simple, until he knows you.  He was dangerous to the careless even in my day, but he’s wild, now.  Don’t give him a reason to hurt you._  

The regret was in the clench of her fingers, the white in her knuckles.  Will had taken her hand. 

Hannibal stalks around him, his gait smooth, scenting the air.  “There is a familiarity, but it isn’t _on_ you.  These are not your lands.”

“They could be.”  Will swallows, and tips his head up, unflinching  though Hannibal closes, scenting so close to his throat his hair nearly brushes Will’s cheek.  “I have the right.  My grandmother was a Lecter.”

“No child of Robert’s will ever have this land; I swore—“

“Mischa Lecter.” 

His hand is on Will’s throat so suddenly it seems not even a blink could have hidden the motion, the curl of his fingers deceptively soft, the press of his palm uncomfortably warm against Will’s Adam’s apple.  Warm, like the steady heat of banked ash, burning beneath the surface, hotter when he presses. 

“If you lie, I’ll boil your blood.”  Another man, likely, would hear only the nonchalance, but there is the faintest quiver beneath it—so faint Will can’t be sure he heard it at all, but he felt it, and feels it still.  The taste of wanting, of pain, of hope too long held to be believed. 

Will breathes deep against the heat, and talks quickly.  “She went to the forest.  The others died when a plane hit the cabin, but she didn’t.  She didn’t.  She nearly starved in the woods trying to find her way back, but she was found, and she ended up in America.  She married a farmer; she raised my father, and when my parents died she raised me.  She’s gone—“ he says that quicker still, heading off the question he could feel rising between them as clearly as he feels Hannibal’s dismay at the truth.  His nails bite into Will’s skin, and Will presses forward.  “—but she wanted me to come home, and she told me how, so I came.”  Will licks his lips, and takes a risk with a truth she never spoke, but that he knows all the same.  “I think she didn’t want either one of us to be alone.” 

The silence stretches, and Will can feel the heat on his skin radiating deeper, the beginnings of a burn across the surface.  Even so, even with the heat and the brush of Hannibal’s nose at the back of his collar as he scents him again, the moment isn’t uncomfortable. 

“You have a touch of the scent, but so would Robert’s child.” 

She had always called her uncle _the traitor_ , and Will never asked, but he feels the same venom in Hannibal, the same bitter betrayal.  Perhaps, one day, he can ask him instead. 

“What proof can you give me?”

“I can’t.  _But_ —“ he squeezes it out, eager to stave off the increased pressure, the increased heat.  It feels, now, as if the center of Hannibal’s palm holds a quarter, fire hot, fierce enough to brand.  Beneath it, Will feels strangely calm.  This is the test he came here for.  Hannibal will believe, or he won’t.  Either way, the curiosity borne of a thousand nights of stories of this place and this man-who-is-more-than-a-man will have been sated, and laid to rest. 

Will closes his eyes.

“I have what she told me, what Robert wouldn’t know.  You used to make the fireflies dance outside her window when she couldn’t sleep.  You didn’t tell her it killed them, but she found out on her own, and pretended she didn’t know so you wouldn’t stop.  You grew eggplants on her dresser because she loved the color, and you once turned the upstairs ballroom into ice so she could skate in the middle of an autumn afternoon.” 

Hannibal’s chest expands hard against his back, and Will knows he is seeing it, too, as Will has a hundred times.  She would tell the story with such abandon, tears wet on her lashes. 

 _He touched the floor, and the ice spread out from his hand like ripples on a pond.  You wouldn’t believe it, Will, unless you saw it.  It was like something out of a dream._  

She had failed to understand, then, that Will could see it already, skating on the film of her memories.

Will swallows, his eyelids flickering.  “There was a picture that hung in her mother’s room; they had taken it down to frame it.  You made ash in your hand and let her dip hers in, and you put your handprints on the back, side by side.  I couldn’t find the picture, but, I—“

“It was, no doubt, sold.”  There is a scratch in his voice, a catch like barbed wire as he lets go.  Will doesn’t care rub his throat, only opens his eyes when he can feel that Hannibal is moving.  “A few of them got away with bits of art.  Contrary to the tales, not everyone who touched this place died inside it.  I was distracted, in those days.  I wasn’t always….entirely thorough.” 

Will’s noise as his eyes open is non-committal, instinctual.  “From what I’ve heard, that depends on the definition of the word.”

In the quirk in his lips, Will can almost see the laughing face in Mischa’s pictures, her body in his hands when all of her fit so neatly inside his grasp.  “Depth of punishment, but not breadth, would be more accurate.”  His eyes are skimming, now, from Will’s hair down to his shoes.  “You have her look, in pieces.”

“That’s all we carry of each other in the end.  Fragments and blood.” 

Hannibal’s arms cross over his chest, and it looks more like protection than consideration, though from what Will doesn’t dare assume. 

“If she lived—“  It ends, abruptly, before he can reach the question.  His throat works hard, and Will saves him the trouble, as easy as stepping forward is. 

“She was afraid—“

“She would _never_ —“  Hannibal’s hand flies up, though whether it’s to grab his throat again or out of sheer emotion Will isn’t sure.  Still, the movement is slower this time, and he catches Hannibal’s wrist, despite his snarl, despite the danger. 

“—of disappointing you.”  He finishes as calmly as he began, and feels something in Hannibal sag, a soft twitch in the muscle of his wrist.  “She didn’t want to live forever,” he says, whispering now, the air too thin, too fragile for volume.  “But you knew that, didn’t you?” 

He carries knowing like Mischa did, in the corners of his eyes.  The near smile in them now should be incongruous, but Will feels the pain and joy of it together, and understands. 

“I knew it in her love for the fireflies.  It was right, in her eyes, that they live only for a season.  Before her, I always saw them as little mistakes.  Imperfect.”  Hannibal’s teeth are just visible behind the pale red of his lips, white, and sharp.  Expectant, waiting to taste the shape of words he isn’t sure of.  “Ask your favor, Will Graham.” 

Will’s fingers clench around Hannibal’s wrist, a reflex chasing the quickening beat of both their hearts.  “I am a Lecter, by right of my grandmother’s blood.  I’ve come to claim the house, and the land, and your service.  Tell me I have it.” 

For a half a second, Will wonders what Hannibal do if he decided against him, if the burn on his throat would serve as a target for his teeth. 

“You will, then, not object to taking our name,” He says, all steel.  In this, he will clearly brook no argument.  Fortunately, Will has none.  Hannibal’s arm slips free from his grasp, though he catches Will’s hand before it can fall to bring it in to his lips.   Rather than a kiss, he scents again against his skin, lays his cheek once against his knuckles like the mark of a great cat.  “Will Lecter.  Your claim holds.  We are yours.” 

In his _we_ , Will hears only _I_ , the world of the grounds bound up in the gold of Hannibal’s eyes, the foundations of the house reaching beyond the stone, down into a liquid core where Hannibal’s bones were forged, solid and hot and utterly alive.    


End file.
